The present and the future (?) of online advertising

Two items in the RSS reader caught my eye this morning.

The first comes from Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch, who reports that online advertising — at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL — slowed to a near-standstill in the third quarter. “The combined ad revenues of those four Web bellwethers eked out only 0.6 percent growth, quarter over quarter,” Schonfeld writes.

The second comes from VC Fred Wilson, who suggests a path forward for Google in the area of hyperlocal advertising. The short version: Give every business its own landing page, with the ability to assign it a domain, skin it and further customize it.

The problem, as Wilson sees it, is that it’s hard for local news organizations and others in the local advertising space to sell cost-per-click ads to small businesses that have no websites for the ads to link to. “The local ad agencies and local oriented web services are happy to create a web presence for local merchants, but they are often poorly designed and there’s no standardization of them,” he notes.

Wilson concludes like this:

Google should be the yellow pages of the internet. They are already. But they aren’t doing enough for the local merchant and that’s a big problem that’s impacting all of the other local oriented services. Google is the platform that many internet businesses are built on and in local they need to work harder on their platform so that we can build out the local internet opportunity. And there’s a ton of revenue in this for them if they do.

Will news organizations wait for this to happen, then piggyback on it? Or will some try to get out ahead and offer local advertisers a platform that is both simpler and more sophisticated than what exists now? Is anyone doing a great job in this area already?